Skills#

Overview#

A skill is a stored, versioned procedure — written in Markdown — that Roboto’s AI can apply during a conversation. Skills capture your team’s know-how (“how we review a flight log”, “our QA checklist”) so the AI works from the same instructions for everyone who uses it.

Key properties:

  • Skills are versioned: editing a skill’s content creates or updates versions, and each user chooses which version their AI uses.

  • Skills have one of three accessibility tiers — Private, Org, or Org-editable — chosen by the author.

  • AI usage is opt-in per user: subscribing to a skill and exposing it to your AI are your choices, not the author’s. Making a skill Available to AI pins a specific version for you.

  • The AI applies skills two ways: automatically, when it decides a skill is relevant to your request, or manually, when you invoke one at the start of a turn.

Creating a skill#

From the Agents page. Go to Agents → Skills in the web app and create a skill with a name, a short description of when it should be used, and a Markdown body containing the procedure. The description matters: it’s what the AI reads when deciding whether the skill applies to a request.

From a conversation. If a chat produced a workflow worth keeping, ask AI Chat to turn it into a skill. It drafts a name, description, and body, and — on your approval — opens the skill editor pre-filled with the draft. Nothing is saved until you click Save.

From the SDK.

from roboto.domain.skills import Skill, SkillAccessibility

skill = Skill.create(
    name="qa-review",
    description="Run when the user asks for a QA review of a dataset.",
    body="1. Load the dataset summary...\n2. Check each topic for dropouts...",
    accessibility=SkillAccessibility.Org,
    tags=["qa-review", "triage"],
)

As the author, you are automatically subscribed to your new skill, and its first version is pinned as Available to AI.

Accessibility tiers#

When you create a skill, choose who can see and edit it (you can change this later):

  • Private — only you can see and use it.

  • Org — everyone in your organization can see, subscribe to, and use it; only you can edit it.

  • Org-editable — everyone in your organization can use it, and any subscribed member can also edit its content and create new versions.

Changing a skill’s accessibility and deleting the skill are author-only on every tier.

Subscribing and making skills available to AI#

Skills shared with your org appear in the Org tab of the Skills page. Subscribing adds a skill to your Personal tab and enables manual invocation. Subscribing alone does not let the AI use the skill automatically — that requires a second step: marking it Available to AI, which pins a specific version for your conversations.

Version pins don’t move on their own. If the author publishes a new version, you stay on the version you pinned until you re-pin; the Skills page shows when a newer version is available.

From the SDK:

from roboto.domain.skills import Skill

skill = Skill.from_name("qa-review")
skill.subscribe()          # adds to your Personal tab
skill.set_ai_version(2)    # expose version 2 to your AI
skill.set_ai_version(None) # stop AI auto-invocation, stay subscribed

How the AI uses skills#

Automatic invocation. On every turn, the AI sees the names and descriptions of the skills you’ve made Available to AI. When it decides one applies, it loads the skill’s body and follows the procedure. A skill’s full body is loaded only when the skill is used, so making many skills available adds only names and descriptions to each turn.

Manual invocation. From the chat composer, you can invoke any skill in your Personal tab directly, telling the AI to apply that procedure this turn. Manual invocation always runs the skill’s latest version, regardless of which version (if any) you’ve pinned as Available to AI.

Per-thread overrides (SDK). When starting a thread programmatically, you can invoke skills up front with invoke_skills, or replace your subscription-derived skill set for the thread’s lifetime with available_skills:

from roboto.ai import AgentThread
from roboto.ai.agent_thread import AvailableSkillSpec, InvokeSkillSpec

# Apply a skill at the start of the thread
thread = AgentThread.start(
    "Review dataset ds_abc123",
    invoke_skills=[InvokeSkillSpec(skill_id="sk_abc123")],
)

# Or: make exactly this set auto-invocable for the whole thread,
# ignoring your subscriptions and AI-version pins
thread = AgentThread.start(
    "Review dataset ds_abc123",
    available_skills=[AvailableSkillSpec(skill_id="sk_abc123")],
)

Versioning and deletion#

Versions are editable in place: updating an existing version changes what everyone pinned to it sees on their next turn. Adding a new version moves nobody — every subscriber’s pin stays put until they re-pin. Deleting an individual version clears the AI pin of anyone pinned to it, but their subscription survives. Deleting a skill’s last remaining version deletes the skill itself.

Deleting a skill removes it permanently for everyone, including all versions and subscriptions. Conversations that already loaded the skill keep the text they captured at the time.

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